School made an admin error on DSs predicted grades - Aaarrgh! Is he fucked now?

[BobbieTables]

DS sent his UCAS application today. This evening we had parents evening and discovered that his predicteds are wrong.
They've put CCC on the UCAS form, but it should be BBC.
He's applying to places that want ABB (Aspirational), BCC and BBC.
A quick Google suggests that:

1. Predicted grades are important for offers and;
2. Getting them changed after the application goes in is difficult.

Fucksake.

Anyone been in this situation? Any words of wisdom?

I havent been in this situation but surely the school can take responsiility and contact either UCAS or the universities right away to correct the grades? what did they say when they realised their mistake? how did they say they're going to rectify it? he risks losing most of the universities he's applied to and they need to move quick before rejections start coming in.

Yes agree – it's on the school surely to contact UCAS and get it rectified. I would ask them to do so urgently (like, tomorrow) as offers or rejections will come in pretty quickly at this stage of the game.

I emailed after the subject teachers told me the right grades and I've had a reply saying the teacher in charge of UCAS applications will get back to me in the morning.

How quickly do universities look at them?

It depends on a lot of factors tbh.

DD put her UCAS form in in about November IIRC and had offers from all her choices within a week max.

DS didn't apply till the absolute last minute in Jan; he also got offers very quickly, tho he didn't hear back from his preferred choice (Lboro) until the end of Feb.

Some unis are notoriously late to offer. But the ones I am thinking of are places like St A and Durham which will get a lot of applications. If he is applying for BBC and BCC unis then it may be that they will be keener to get people into place asap.

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I work in a university. The school should be able to change them, we get lots of amendments to ucas forms after they've been submitted though I admit I haven't seen one for predicted grades. It's often adding references which they've forgotten to add or changing their criminal conviction declaration. If he gets any rejections before it's sorted just contact the admissions dept at each individual uni and explain the situation. Because once it's been changed admissions can re enter the application into the pool.

Thank you @PodMom do you know how they do the offers? Is it just sent to those meeting a basic grade criteria fairly automatically and borderline ones are looked at?

It’ll vary from university to university and even by course. So for my course , admission admin person looks and make sure that they meet the basic criteria as we have subject specific requirements. I don’t believe they look at predicted grades.

admin then send through applications to me and I look at the application in more detail including personal statement and grades and decide who can proceed to interview.

Oh my god. I just rang the school and they are going to ring the admissions teams of every place he's applied and get them to manually change it. Hopefully they won't all be off for their christmas holidays.

They do not need to do this! They just need to send an amendment transaction via UCAS.... The application change will be registered on admissions systems once the updated data is received from UCAS

They are contacting UCAS as well. Honestly, I'm glad they are being thorough about it.
I will post back about what happens as I was looking for old thread about similar stuff & couldn't find anything.

I think if they don't do this, there will always be a nagging worry that one or more universities will have already put the application into the "reject" or "consider later" pile and won't pull it out when they get the correction. It might be an unfounded worry, but I think it's worth the double-check.

I'm glad to hear that the school is taking prompt steps to rectify their mistake. Some uni. turn around within 24hrs.